


fucked up beyond repair, but living all the same.

by feyre_darling



Category: The Goldfinch (2019), The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Boris Pavlikovsky - Freeform, Everyone Is Gay, Graphic Description, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Underage Drinking, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, Literally everyone - Freeform, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Suicide Attempt, The Goldfinch, Theodore Decker - Freeform, Underage Drug Use, everything they did was underage ok, im very sorry i hope this isnt too much, including these two, please read with caution this is a heavy fic, theo just has a lot of bad feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:40:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23476342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feyre_darling/pseuds/feyre_darling
Summary: '...His arms, wrapped around me; just as they wrap around me now while I fight for breath like some dying patient on the operating table- my whole insides open and splaying out messily. He tells me to breathe, Potter, and I do what he says because I don’t want to end up like my mother, only visible as a drug in someone’s bloodstream. I want to be real, and here, and alive. I don’t want to be ash and smoke and fire, burnt up into nothing but embers floating away in the dying light.'- post movie ending. Boris and Theo and not much else except shitty memories and a cold hotel room.
Relationships: Theodore Decker/Boris Pavlikovsky
Comments: 2
Kudos: 61





	fucked up beyond repair, but living all the same.

**Author's Note:**

> 'Shh, Potter, he whispered, into the back of my neck. Is only me. It was weird. Was it weird? It was; and it wasn’t. I’d fallen back to sleep shortly after, lulled by his bitter, beery unwashed smell and his breath easy in my ear.'  
> \- donna tart, the goldfinch.
> 
> All characters (and this bEAUtIFUL quote) are hers. Please read the tags before you start this, i gotta warn you, its heavy stuff. xxxxxxx

I dream of my mother again that night.

I suppose it’s to be expected. I’d seen her for the first time in a long time that day- dark hair falling down her back in a single wave; green earrings, glinting as they caught the light; big smile and shiny teeth and all the things I can remember about her. 

I saw her when I took those pills- no, right after, and that’s what I took them for. Lying on the bed over crumpled, unwashed sheets, sweating and shaking, feeling my hands go numb. Watching the dark spots crowd my vision and seeing the outline of her behind them, smiling like she always did.

I would have stayed like that forever, if I could have. Spent the rest of my life suspended in numbness, swimming in the dark and watching her fade in and out of focus like a broken projector stuck on the same thing. Never changing, never ending.

Not living, or dying. Just in between.

I would have stayed like that for as long as I could have, but I guess having a Russian drug-addict for a friend means they know what to look for when someone’s taken twenty pills one after the other that should definitely not be taken one after the other. I keep thinking, now, what I would have done if I’d been a little more awake. Shoved him away? Told him to fuck off and leave me alone until I faded into blackness and turned into nothing?

I know he would’ve have let me go, though. No matter how much of a fight I put up, he would still hold me down and force those pills out of me. I think maybe for his sake, as well as mine.

The night after, I dream of her again. She’s brighter than when I took the pills. Less faded, sharper around the edges. I try to reach out for her; she seems so close, so tangible and real, so real I can almost touch her and feel her warmth, the blood pulsing around her body. A living, breathing thing. But it ends like it always does; a crushing sense of guilt, explosions full of ash and smoke and fire, the air so thick I can hardly breathe. It covers me from head to foot, burying me under so that when I try to scramble upwards I just sink deeper. My mouth, full of ash; lungs full too. 

I wake up screaming and tasting smoke, gagging and retching over the side of the hotel bed. I can’t take a full breath- my body won’t let me; it’s like I’m still under, choking and struggling to get to the surface, suffocating in blackness. I don’t like this blackness as I liked the other one, where everything was warm and slipping away from me slowly. This blackness is cold and sharp and digs a pit right in my stomach that makes me feel empty and hollow and makes it entirely impossible to take in any breath. I gasp in what little air I can between retches, hands braced on the side table, reaching blindly for something steady to hold and knocking over a glass that lands heavily on the carpet. 

The next thing my arm lands on is his arm. It’s sturdy, and feels like the only thing that’s not swimming around my head, so I grab onto it tighter and heave violently, though nothing seems to be coming up. The arm moves, gently- I’ve never felt it like this before, so still- and it gives me a strange sense of calm that only lasts for a second as it moves onto my back, rubbing small circles. The other arm holds me up as lean, probably so I don’t fall flat on my face onto the fucking carpet that’s covered with his bloodstains.

When part of it’s over and I’ve stopped trying to bring the whole contents of my stomach back up, he pulls me back and I lie there, staring up at the ceiling, thinking of my mother and how close I was to her.

I want to take pills again. Maybe not so many this time, just enough to make me see her, watch her black hair swirl around me as I fade. But not enough to kill me- I tried that, yesterday, and it was only afterwards that I realised how much I would miss if I was in blackness forever. They come to me in a burst of brightness.

Mrs Barbour and her fragile smile. Hobie. His antiques, furniture neatly stacked and polished in his dusty workshop filled with some of the happiest days I can remember. Pippa. Orange hair, morphine lollipops and Bach and Beethoven, sharing earphones as the sun goes down. Pianos. Andy, glasses on the edge of his nose, wrinkling with disgust as he talks about sailing. Sharing cigarettes with Boris underneath his covers. Swigging beer from the same bottle, swearing, laughing, stumbling around as we sing. 

His arms, wrapped around me; just as they wrap around me now while I fight for breath like some dying patient on the operating table- my whole insides open and splaying out messily. He tells me to breathe, Potter, and I do what he says because I don’t want to end up like my mother, only visible as a drug in someone’s bloodstream. I want to be real, and here, and alive. I don’t want to be ash and smoke and fire, burnt up into nothing but embers floating away in the dying light.

So I breathe, and struggle, and breathe, and my chest heaves up and down until it hurts, but I still listen to him, and I breathe; I breathe until I can breathe again, for real. Curled up like a child, forehead on his chest, heartbeat loud in my ear.

I feel like I’m thirteen again. Smelling of sweat and unwashed clothes and vodka and feeling his arms around me.

Shh, Potter, shh. Sleep, Potter, sleep.

I feel like that. It’s funny, how only yesterday I was shoving pills down my throat and he was shoving his fingers down there to get them back up, dragging me across the floor, along the street, telling me to walk, Potter, you must walk, Ладно? 

I slept for most of the day. Nothing felt real. Sometimes when I woke he was there, and sometimes he wasn’t. I called for him once, half awake, half asleep, suffocating in a smothering blanket of dreams and bad memories and wanting to take all the drugs I can think of. 

He’s next to me when I’m screaming, just like when we were kids. Holding onto me, taking on all my shit even though he’s got his own shit to deal with. He presses a kiss to my forehead, and then one to my lips, lightly, so lightly he barely touches them and for a moment I don’t know if it actually happens or if I’m still dreaming.

It’s dark in the room. I can breathe now, but my chest hurts like someone’s kicked me hard. I find the side of his face with my hand, find the lips that I’m sure just touched mine. His breath trembles, hot against my fingers, and I think he’s scared- I don’t know why, I’ve never seen him this scared before. I pull him down towards me and there’s a flurry of movement in the darkness- my hand in his hair, his hand, calloused and rough yet somehow soft as it touches my cheek. I reach for his shirt to try to pull it off, but he’s already shirtless, and so am I, though I don’t remember getting undressed. I was still in the same dirty, sweat drenched suit from that morning the last time I remember.

There’s not a word for Boris and me. There never was, really. I don’t know what you would call it- if you could call it anything at all. Even in this moment, as I’m pulling his mouth onto mine as if I’m hungry for it, I still don’t know. 

I’ve kissed him before, I think. Not the time when I was leaving for New York and it was over before it had even begun, but before that, at my dad’s house in Vegas. On more than one drug fuelled occasions where the walls bounced off each other and everything was purple and glittering and fuzzy around the edges. Murky, fucked up nights where we couldn’t tell which body part was who’s, fumbling around desperately in the dark, waking up forgetting most of it, but not all. 

I think he remembers it, too.

I turn over, now, so I’m over him instead, and my mouth hesitates over his, brushing against it lightly, cautiously. It’s still snowing outside. There’s a faint breeze wafting in through an open window; everything in the room is cold but his body under mine, hot breath and heavy chests, unsure of what we’re doing. He puts a hand on my jaw, brushing over my lip, and for a moment we stay there, breathing heavily, faded silhouettes shuddering in the dark.

I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m supposed to be marrying Kitsey, and I’m supposed to be in love with Pippa, but it’s complicated and right now I can’t think of anything else but him.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

What the fuck am I doing?

I ask him this, and he laughs against my mouth.

“Don’t ask me, Potter. Don’t ask me, because I don’t know.”

I realise it’s true- he doesn’t know any more than I do. So I keep going, even though my head is screaming at me not to. We go to sleep like we did when we were younger, clutching at each other like runaway children. I guess that’s what we are- running away from our fuck ups and taking drugs to make these fuck ups disappear so we can pretend we’re better people than we are.

Ssh, Potter. Is only me.

That night, the night I dream of my mother again, the night after I’d been in my hotel room for days and tried to kill myself in the bathroom and written a hundred letters to people I may never see again, I knew that I wouldn’t have traded it for anything. My fucked up, drugged up life that made me want to have died in that explosion with her, and still I wouldn’t give it up. Not now, anyway.

It’s strange, how we find such beauty in broken things. Things that may never be fixed- like him and me. Fucked up beyond repair, but living all the same.

I go back to sleep, and this time I dream of nothing at all.

**Author's Note:**

> i love this book will all my heart. the movie was brilliant, but definitely didn't go into as much depth. i would recommend them both.
> 
> tried a new writing style with this one, which basically just means shitting out a load of words onto a page and calling it theo's brain. hope you liked it.


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